Frédérick GravelSome Hope for the Bastards

March 22, 2019

March 22, 2019

[A]rguably the most significant dance artist to emerge in Quebec in the past 10 years… He produces dance theatre that is sly and subversive.

— The Globe and Mail

“Gravel’s work reminded me of what art can look like when we approach it with complete honesty and with the simple tools available to us- the breath in our lungs, the muscles in our limbs and cores.” - Vancouver Arts Review

Choreographer Frédérick Gravel returns to the Quick Center, taking the stage by storm with nine supercharged dancers and two musicians for a choreographic concert of downright corrosive energy. For the musically adventurous and visually attuned, Gravel offers a spectacle to savor— an unholy hybrid of the highbrow and the high-octane with musical references of rock, R&B, and even classical.

The purpose of this new work? “To bring a little light to the world.” Gravel seeks to lift us above the twenty-four hour news cycle and impulsive Googling that leaves us more informed than ever, but feeling hopeless to make any meaningful change in the mountainous issues that plague us. Forget “a little light.” Frédérick Gravel ignites.

In this sprawling sonic universe, the dancers come to life; when they move, it’s with the force of obsession and their bodies shift between repose and ecstatic motion. It’s dance and movement so entrancing that you’ll struggle to stay in your seat as the propulsive beats roll and the dancers move in finely controlled harmony. Beauty is rarely this entertaining, and entertainment rarely this exalted.

Gravel electrifies audiences with dance that is rock ‘n’ roll sexy and in the moment.

Frédérick Gravel is a dancer, choreographer, guitarist, singer, and lighting designer whose work is presented not only in underground performance spaces in Montreal and New York, but at scholarly symposia as well. Gravel cultivates artistic ambiguity, cultural meeting points, the mixing of disciplines, and post-modern irony. He plays with the contemporary zeitgeist; flippant and skeptical. He is complicit with the audience, thumbing his nose at the avant-garde; at the exclusive preserves of the elite. In lucid, offhand fashion, he takes popular culture and establishment culture out of their assigned roles and brings them together.